Overview of Project:
The following is a brief overview of the project. I have also highlighted the roles I undertook and included a graph representing the team's strengths within the project. There is also a small chart highlighting the individuals with their assigned roles.
Researching Particle Systems:
To kick off the first week of the collaboration, I started researching the possible particle effects that could be added to our game. After discussing with the team and receiving some ideas, I created a list of particle systems I could develop later. I wanted to keep the number of particle systems to a minimum to keep the workload manageable. After finding suitable particle systems to add in, I began researching and looking at examples of these particle systems in other games and tutorials.
Developing Particle Systems:
In the second task of the collaborative effort, I started to develop the particle effects that I had researched and set out in the list above. After trying to create the particle systems, I had to cut most of them out due to workload and complications in developing them; there was also the issue of whether or not they were necessary in the game. In the end, I successfully developed 2/6 of the particle systems. We also reduced the number of particle systems due to the impact on the game's performance. Both developed particle systems turned out to be perfect and had no problems during development.
Audio Assets Research:
The next task was to gather a list of the possible audio assets and their MP3 files. After looking at the player movements and the game environment's theme, I found suitable audio assets for the game. This was very time-consuming because I had to find the best audio to fit. Also, a lot of sound websites required payment, which also made it increasingly challenging to locate sounds. Ultimately, I successfully secured 12 different sounds for the game and uploaded them to Teams for the other colleagues to approve.
Outer Bounds Issue Research:
My main focus in the third week of collaboration was to research a possible solution for the player exiting the island. This issue was discovered when we play-tested the game; the player was able to jump over the walls and get into the water, resulting in them not being able to continue playing the game. After researching solutions, I came up with two possible solutions:
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Box Collison, where the player can get out of the level
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Development of a respawn system
After consulting with the rest of the group, we agreed to progress the respawn system. During the discussion, it was also suggested that we could tweak the game so that the player was punished for entering the outbounds. However, that remained a development idea and was not incorporated. To help visualise this, I also broke down the idea and the mechanic on the Miro board for my colleagues to see.
Developing Mechanic:
After researching and designing the outer bounds mechanic, I needed to develop it within the engine, which was my first task in the final week. This mechanic's development involved trial and error to ensure it would work perfectly without interfering with other code within the engine. As I wasn't part of the tech team, I was nervous about implementing this. No-one would thank me for messing up the existing code. However, testing ensured I did not run into any problems and the mechanic worked perfectly for the game. Overall, I was happy with this as it was the most complex task for me to complete during the collaboration. When the player touches the box collider, they now spawn immediately back onto the map using an actor linked to it.
